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By BV Swagath, published on January 13, 2007

The biggest thing to have happened to Indian cricket is the successful comeback of Sourav Ganguly. It's good news that he has been selected for the One Day Team now, which gives us an additional match winner. Look at the Australian team, each and every member gets counted and each and every player can win the match on his own. In the case of India, it is completely different, we always have to depend on our key players to fire on cylinders for a win, which is not possible most of the time.

Ganguly, when he was selected for the South African Tour wasn't coming with tons of runs under his belt in whatever domestic cricket he had played. One belief is that wherever Ganguly had played, he had to face a green track, one that makes the ball to seam around and one that makes an average pace bowler look deadly. Now that only made Sourav Ganguly, a much tougher batsman, willing to fight it out in the middle. The efforts were there on his part in a sincere manner even though he didn't get the big runs. As someone who has been working on Indian first class cricket for the last few seasons, I must say that in many tight scoring games that Bengal or East Zone has played, Ganguly has had a part to play whether it is with the bat or the ball. Let's not talk about the fielding here, I am sure he isn't as bad a fielder as he is projected to be. My complaint about Dada is that he works very hard to get settled, but on most occasions, he has wasted the starts and had failed to convert his 30s and 40s into noticeable scores. What got him into the Test Side was the consistent failure of the kids that got a long run in the Indian team thanks to the stubborn thinking of Mr. Greg Chappell. Ever since, Dilip Vengsarkar has taken over Kiran More (whom I call as a joker!), there has been some new thinking infused. Chappell has been forced to become a spectator from a dictator!

If at all Ganguly could have stuck in the Indian team for a longer haul during his first comeback, which was against Sri Lanka and then against Pakistan, it was through a couple of hundreds. He did work his way out against bowlers like Muttiah Muralitharan, Shoaib Akhtar, Mohammad Asif when India was under pressure and under testing conditions. But as and when he looked good for a bigger feat, a lapse in concentration was all enough for his efforts to be cut short. Someone like Yuvraj Singh stole the limelight simply because he made bigger score than Dada. I get annoyed to see Ganguly failing to get those tall scores, when he's got a hundred, I expect him to make it much bigger like how Sachin Tendulkar, VVS Laxman, Rahul Dravid and even Virender Sehwag have done in the past. By that any failures can be covered up by the big scores and with that the average is never a moderate 30.00! Rahul Dravid and Sourav Ganguly had made their test debut at the same place, at the same time, but ten years later we find that the difference between the two batsmen is more than 3700 test runs!

Now that Dada is indeed back and has a good chance of making it to the World Cup in the Caribbean, let's look at what role he can play. The pitches in West Indies are going to be virgins as they are being relaid, we can expect them to be on the slower side or they might just seam around! Either way, Ganguly is more than a handy part time medium pacer who can exploit both these conditions. One must not forget that he had also taken five-wicket hauls with the ball. His ability to strike the ball cleanly would be an advantage which India has missed out recently at the top of the order. The team management has been cautious in saving Dhoni in the later stages of the innings and thus compromising at the top of the order. We know that Sachin Tendulkar has been disappointing to say the least with his over cautious batting when the ball is new even if it's the powerplay blocks in play. Virender Sehwag, one never knows, he is a hero or a zero! So India does require a back up in the form of Ganguly, who is the best choice to open the innings to have the left and right combo to unsettle the bowlers. Someone like Sehwag can drop down the order, perhaps to no.3 to relive the great opening partnerships that Tendulkar-Ganguly had put in the past. We need to pack the Indian team with 11 match winners, one of those has to be Dada. There shouldn't be any passengers who are just filling up numbers. Someone like Munaf Patel or Irfan Pathan need to live to their potentials, otherwise no use.

There is enough talent that's coming up in Indian Cricket. Gautam Gambhir, Suresh Raina, Rohit Sharma, S Badrinath and many others are around. But they can wait for sometime as the countdown for the careers of some big Indian Cricketers has started. It's now or never for the Selectors to make full use of whatever the likes of Tendulkar, Ganguly, Kumble and others can put up on the field. There's nothing that can beat EXPERIENCE! So the message to Rahul Dravid and co. is to make best use of Sourav Ganguly for the benefit of Team India.

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